Katie King - The Evacuee Summer - Heart-warming historical fiction, perfect for summer reading

A farmer called Mr Hobbs was fed up with an extra mouth to feed that wasn’t earning its keep in these straightened times, Roger explained, and so following a sermon he’d given one Sunday that managed to speak about the value of Shank’s pony, and Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus (Roger having been inordinately proud of a joke he had been able to construct around these two things), Mr Hobbs had offered Roger the pony and trap on loan to use as an alternative to the car when out and about his parish.

‘I thought at once of our unused stables just across the back yard and so I just heard myself replying “what a wonderful offer” and “of course we’d love to have the pony and its trap”,’ Roger said.

Mabel shook her head as if to say that Roger had very possibly taken leave of his senses. But there was a twinkle in her eye and Peggy didn’t think Mabel was really put out by what Roger had agreed.

‘I suppose my acceptance might have been hastened by having already had to bicycle to old Mr Bennett at dawn – he’s on his last legs, poor chap, and there’ll be bad news soon – and then go straight over to see Mrs Daley as her own brood and their evacuees have all got chickenpox. And all before breakfast, might I say, which was a lot of pedalling on the boneshaker, I can tell you,’ mused Roger, ‘and I thought of a pony and trap, and sitting there thinking up ideas for my sermon, and it seemed a good thing…’

Peggy knew how heavy Roger’s ancient bicycle was, and she saw his point.

Mabel didn’t look so sympathetic. ‘’Onestly, Roger, what are you like? Well, you kiddies shall take care of t’ pony,’ Mabel told the children, ‘an’, you all mark this, I’ll send ’im back the first sign o’ trouble, you see if I don’t.’

‘Deal!’ they yelled in chorus, clearly delighted with the furry new arrival, and the long summer holidays stretching ahead not too far away.

Mabel had taken charge of getting everything ready for the pony, and after school she had set the children to cleaning out one of the shabby old stables and slapping a new coat of whitewash over the ancient brick walls. After, that is, they had dealt with a veritable festoon of cobwebs that needed pulling down. Connie turned out to be the only one without any fear of the host of understandably now tetchy spiders, much to the embarrassment of the boys, Tommy and Jessie, but Aiden too. He was a Harrogate lad in Tommy’s class and was also staying at the rectory where the boys all bunked up together in a huge but always messy bedroom. This meant that Aiden’s parents could rent out his room as there had been such an influx of people to the area since the war had begun.

Next, Mabel made the gang swish the tail end of a bar of red Lifebuoy carbolic soap about in piping-hot water from the kettle on the hob that had been poured into a couple of metal pails until the water looked opaque and medicinal. Then the children happily sloshed it about in the stall to thoroughly disinfect the floor, before using a stiff broom to swoosh the dirtied water outside. Then they neatly piled some bales of straw and hay, which had arrived while they were at school, into the stall next door, all the boys except Jessie trying to show how strong they were for the benefit of the girls.

The two buckets they’d used had been scrubbed and rinsed to within an inch of their lives to remove any smell of the Lifebuoy, after which Connie and Aiden chased each other around with the buckets half-filled with clean water trying to splash each other. Once the children were worn out, the buckets had been allowed to air-dry, as had an old zinc dustbin with a tightly fitting lid that had also been disinfected and would keep vermin out so the pony’s hard feed could be kept clean and dry. Afterwards, even Mabel couldn’t bring to mind anything else that needed doing.

This wasn’t like Mabel at all, and so it wasn’t a surprise to anybody that she put her thinking cap on and looked around for other jobs to do. Eventually, Mabel found, in an old lean-to near the chicken coops, some ancient and rather cobwebby items of grooming kit that looked as if they dated from well before the last war, in fact prior to 1910 was likely – which was the last time the stables had been occupied by horses instead of only mice and spiders – and so these elderly brushes and a currycomb had to be washed and disinfected too, and then left in a patch of bright sunlight to dry.

None of the evacuees had ever done any feeding or grooming of horses or ponies, although Connie and Jessie had sometimes helped the milkman, with his horse-drawn milk cart, to deliver the glass bottles of creamy milk to houses in Jubilee Street if they were up early enough on Saturdays (which wasn’t often as the milkman and his horse with his muffled hooves did plod along the twins’ home street very early in order to be in time for as many breakfasts as possible).

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Roger, ‘but I don’t think we should worry too much about our lack of equine knowledge. I can always speak to the pony’s owner if there’s anything we’re uncertain about, and I’m sure that as long as the pony has its scran and nobody is ever too loud, or mean, or boisterous near him, then everything will be dandy.’

The only girl evacuee, besides Connie, at Tall Trees was Angela, who had been in Connie and Jessie’s class at school back at home in south-east London. Sadly, Angela was in a wheelchair following an unfortunate run-in the previous Halloween with a car driving without headlights in the blackout. All the same, Angela was determined to pull her weight as far as the pony was concerned, and after she heard Roger say that he didn’t know much about ponies, she persuaded Tommy – the strongest of the children, as there were a lot of kerbs and inclines to navigate – to push her in her wheelchair over to the library so that she could bone up on horse care.

Angela was very thorough in her research, despite Tommy’s recurring refrain of ‘I’m bored’ whispered to her in ever-shortening intervals between his stints of messing about in the road outside the library, despite the stern ‘shush’ hissed in his direction by the librarian. Angela made careful and copious notes on feeding and how to rub down and what the various parts of a pony’s feet were called, feeling this was the least she could do as she had had to watch from her chair as the others worked to clean out the stable, knowing that Tommy’s suggestion that she be gaffer was just to make her feel less of a sore thumb.

Shyly, Angela showed Peggy her jotter once they were home that evening. Peggy had been her schoolteacher a while back, and she was impressed by the diligent way that Angela had written her notes. ‘Goodness me, that looks useful,’ Peggy said, and Angela allowed herself to smile when she added, ‘That pony is going to have a lot to thank you for, and you are going to be kept busy checking that the others are doing everything properly. Well done, Angela, really well done.’

The night they had arrived in Harrogate, nearly nine months earlier, Jessie had named his new grey teddy Neville in honour of Prime Minister Chamberlain. Jessie’s Neville was the brother bear to Connie’s black and white panda Petunia, the knitted bears being a surprise, hidden by their mother in their luggage as a treat for them to find when they came to unpack their belongings in their new billets.

Jessie wondered if they would be allowed to give the pony a new name when he arrived. ‘If so, we could call him Winston maybe?’ he asked, seeing as Winston Churchill had recently become Prime Minister.

Connie used her most strident voice to butt in quickly, ‘Gi’ over, Jessie, Winston’s a terrible name, and you know it. What about Winnie? Much better.’